“Then you don’t have anything to worry about, do you?” Agnes asked, because I’d probably spoken that last part aloud. Although how she’d heard me with the wind picking up, I didn’t know. I was sick of being cold, I was sick of this war, and I was sick of her.

“Let’s just get this over with,” I said.

“We’ll go slowly to start,” Gertie assured me. And before she’d finished speaking—

We went nowhere. My feet never moved, and I never shifted. But the scene around us started to change.

I stood still while the sun moved backward across the sky, while stars bloomed overhead, while clouds raced about like they were on speed, and while the water sloshed over my shoes again and again, as the tide surged and receded. I tried to move away but it didn’t work, with my feet feeling like they were welded to the stony sand. So, I just stood there, with my stockings getting soggier and my toes starting to freeze as the days flew by in reverse.

“This is what happens when you shift,” Gertie explained. “But you do it so quickly that you never notice. You can slow it down, however—”

“Why?” I managed to ask, through numb lips.

“This is why,” she said, and took my hand.

And, suddenly, I could move again, and walk beside her along the sand as people flashed into and out of existence around us. A fisherman and his boat flickered into our path, and then was gone, as if washed away on the tide. A couple of kids, scavenging for saleable junk along the shore, did likewise, but not before one found a coin and took off with it, the other in hot pursuit. An old woman sat by the embankment, her dirty skirts piled around her knees, and raised a bottle to her lips. But the next second, she was gone, too, just like a man who walked casually through the middle of me.

“Be still,” Gertie told me, as I jerked. “You’re not really here.”

“Then where am I?”

“In the space in between.”

This was starting to be too existential for me, but I took the bait anyway. “In between what?”

“Seconds, moments, years, eons.” She fluttered a gloved hand. “When you’re shifting, you’re not really anywhere. You are in the process; you are a potential, not a reality. Not until you arrive. But what if you postpone that arrival for a while?”

I blinked at her, feeling about as stupid as I usually did during one of these lessons. I heard Agnes snort behind me, and bristled even before she spoke. “You’re wasting your time. She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t understand anything.”

“Don’t you?” Gertie looked at me keenly. “Can you think of no reason why you might want to be nowhere?”

“I’ve been nowhere,” I reminded her. “I’ve been outside time—”